Thursday, June 26, 2008

Living according to Nature.

Aphoristic work at its best,i must admit the quality of Nietzsche's prose is dazzling and without a shadow of doubt, second to none.Here he speaks about nature and 'living according to nature'.

You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you nobleStoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being likeNature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, withoutpurpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at oncefruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselvesINDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance withsuch indifference? To live--is not that just endeavouring to beotherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring,being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? Andgranted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," meansactually the same as "living according to life"--how could you doDIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what youyourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quiteotherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture thecanon of your law in Nature, you want something quite thecontrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! Inyour pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature,to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insistthat it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would likeeverything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternalglorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love fortruth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, andwith such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is tosay, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise--and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives youthe Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize overyourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allowherself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART ofNature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: whathappened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, assoon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It alwayscreates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise;philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritualWill to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will tothe causa prima.